- All right, let's talk about money.
Let's talk about why from 64 and a half million views,
we only have $3,000 in revenue.
(upbeat music)
Now then.
Hey folks, I'm Rob, welcome back to the vidIQ
educating you as always on your YouTube journey.
But today, I'm going to do a little bit of
self-education as well,
because what we're going to do is a rummage through
the analytics of the vidIQ channel for April, 2021.
Now, I have seen other creators do this
and I think it's a wonderful exercise
in honesty and vulnerability
to share what's working on your channel and what isn't.
So what I'm keen to stress here is that,
this is not necessarily a tips, tricks, advice and strategy
on YouTube Analytics video.
This is self-discovery, self-exploration, exposing yourself
to the things that work on your channel and don'ts
and we'll learn this together in this video.
So without further ado,
let's expose you to vidIQ's channel analytics.
Ooh.
Okay let's take a bird's eye view of this first.
I'm seeing the statistics for April, 2021
but it's also showing the previous 12 months
in these columns.
To get this view, at least at the beginning of the month,
what you want to do is switch your time period
to the last full month.
And then it shows these columns.
Although you can go daily still here if you want to.
I really hope YouTube keep this column view
for the whole of a month,
because usually they just plunk it in for a couple of days
and then it disappears.
Anyway, and the headline statement is,
the channel got 2.2 million views,
which is usually what we get.
And these hollowed out ticks mean that
we were just about the same as usual.
We'll get back to the fact that we earned $17, 50 cents
from 2 million views a little bit later.
And you know, this is okay, this is a five out of 10 months
in terms of performance.
And you can see that over the past 12 months,
we're still in a little bit of a dip.
Over 2021, we'd been going up and down
between two million and two and a half million.
At the back end of last year,
we dipped down a little bit more.
And at this time last year, we were starting to skyrocket.
And the simple reason for that,
this is kind of described by YouTube
as seasonality changes
but it was quite a big seasonality change
because it was during the height of a pandemic
everybody was in lockdown or restricted access
to the world.
Many people took to YouTube, not just to view
but to start channels as well.
So for all of our education content,
as you can see in May,
we went up to nearly 3.2 million views
where Marvin delighted that the world
is returning to normal
but it means that our channel is leveling off a little bit
in terms of YouTube education.
And ultimately as any channel
you want to see your stats going up into the right.
So we're not necessarily growing.
We're just holding a level playing field right now.
So me as a creator, I always want to try and improve that.
I think that the reason
for that is kind of revealed in these top videos
in that most of these are older videos,
evergreen content
and that is very common for utility channels
where they make videos that are six months,
12 months old
and they start to find attraction on YouTube Search.
And so we have videos such as how to get 100 subscribers
that was made at the beginning of 2020.
And the other one about
getting the first thousand subscribers
something about copyright all towards the beginning of 2020.
So we were on a run there,
there are a couple of more recent videos
how to start a gaming channel
in January of this year
and then how to make shorts at the end of last year.
And that's kind of what I'm looking for
with vidIQ content stuff.
That's going to be successful with our returning viewers,
our current loyal fans, such as yourself
but also stuff it's going to be picked up in search
and it can be hit and miss sometimes it really works for us.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Now let's jump into the month in a little more detail.
And as you can see
we're a very stable channel, nothing too exciting here.
We have a little spikes whenever we launch new videos
but there's nothing viral you might say
or something that's really bringing
in a brand new audience at a impressive level.
And this really tracks back for the last 365 days.
Peaks and troughs day to day
but no major declines, no major increases
it just again reflects that
during the height of the pandemic
we were getting about a hundred thousand views
now we're more in a region of 70,000 to 80,000 views.
So a bit of a 20% drop-off,
but this is good in a sense that
we know we have a very stable channel
and a fairly solid fan base.
I'm going to just switch this to custom now
you can see these major peaks that span over 2018 and 2019.
And this is when I got
into a habit of chasing viral news stories
particularly when it came to Mr. Beast
and also Pewdiepie versus T-series.
And they were subscriber stories
and we would see videos go viral
and you never get maybe 400,000 views in a single day.
But the problem was that for the majority
of the audience who watched that video
and maybe subscribe to the channel,
there was nothing for them afterwards.
They were interested in the subscriber story
but they weren't necessarily interested
in YouTube growth for itself.
So it's that classic case of,
a video goes viral on your channel,
which isn't necessarily about your core topic
and your target audience.
What do you do next to keep them intrigued and entertained?
We were able to do that
but when we started to focus so solely on YouTube education
you can see that we've had the extra little growth here
it's kind of all dwarf that perspective
because of these one day fireable moments
but I'm more satisfied with certainly the last 18 months
of content than I am with ease spiky efforts here.
All right, let's talk about money.
Let's talk about why from 64 and a half million views
we only have $3,000 in revenue.
We'll put simply none
of this revenue is actually from AdSense.
We don't monetize any of our contents on YouTube.
And there's a very simple reasons for that.
We don't want to create any sort of barrier
to your education experience here with vidIQ.
We're here to help you and give you as much value
as possible without out adverts getting in the way.
Now, on the other side of this, we are of course
a software tool that's designed to help you grow.
And within that software
there are upgrades where you can go to vidIQ pro and boost.
So the job of the channel is to raise awareness
of what vidIQ is as a brand.
So you see a video about how to get a thousand subscribers.
It may briefly mention vidIQ,
but the focus is on you and your YouTube journey,
but now you're aware of vidIQ,
maybe you subscribe to the channel
or watch more of our content.
Then maybe you see in another video that we're talking
about a specific vidIQ tool
and that encourages you to download the tool.
And as your YouTube journey continues
and your channel grows,
then may be you may start to invest
in our products and services
which for us is far more valuable
in terms of an income revenue stream.
So if you ever ask why we don't monetize our content
I'm now going to push you
to this section of this video
to find out why
let's dig a little bit more into the detail then
and look at reach impressions are significantly down.
There could be a couple of reasons for that
seasonality changes again,
as the world opens up more from COVID-19
and we're moving to the spring and summer months,
people are outdoors more often
or it could be that our video content
over April just hasn't resonated as well with our audience.
So YouTube not sharing it as much.
Having said that impressions to click-through rate is up.
That could be big again
because YouTube is sharing our content less
or because the thumbnails that I made
over the last month have been a little bit better.
I would have to dig into the details
of those specific videos and from nails to find out
traffic sources as always for us
will be heavily influenced by search.
And that's not always the case for all channels.
We would still love to get more traffic
from suggested videos so that when people are learning
about YouTube growth, they're seeing vidIQ recommended
on the right-hand side or underneath the video.
If you're on mobile.
But search continues to be key for us
and this is why as a education utility-based channel
we're always going to suggest that one
of the key ways you can get discovered to begin with
is through search based content.
But ultimately you want YouTube to do
all of the work for you
in terms of recommending your content
right now 42% of our content is seen
through YouTube recommending it.
We would always want that to be higher.
And for certain channels, it certainly will be
what we're really strong at is getting views not only
from YouTube Search, so internal to the platform
but externally through Google Search.
And if you look down here
almost half of our external traffic comes
from Google Search and that's because when people search
for things on Google that have to do with
well anything really, but in YouTube examples
how to delete a YouTube video,
how to add a playlist
how to add subtitles to YouTube videos
which we've all done.
When Google can find a suitable video on YouTube
it will place that video prominently in search.
And sometimes it'll show you key moments
in the video on Google Search,
which is why it's really important to have
timestamps on your videos.
So we get a lot of traffic from Google Search
and that's something that I've certainly targeted
in the past.
Onto engagement now, and here are some
really interesting analytics
but unfortunately right now are ruined
by the way YouTube displays them
key moments for audience retention.
We've talked a lot about how important it is to
keep your audience hooks for the first moments of a video
because once you've lost them, then they're gone completely.
But as I said, YouTube, right now
plunks live streams into video on demand.
So all of these top four videos that have 90%
plus audience retention look fantastic
but they're all live streams.
So it doesn't really give me the information I really need.
So I'm looking at video five downwards,
and this is what I'm
absolutely desperate to improve right now
the audience retention over the first 30 seconds
because I think that will have a significant impact
on the audience retention of our videos in total
which is around about 40%.
My target is to try and get audience retention
to 70% or above on videos that are 10 minutes or less.
When videos are longer like this one's going to be.
Then there is usually a bit more viewer fatigue
right at the start, because if a hook isn't powerful enough
a viewer is just going to say, I'm not going to sit
through 25 more minutes of this, but again
this is an experimental video
and I'm doing it really for you.
Hardcore analytics nerds who really want to jump into this.
The video I did about YouTube permission, 67%.
I think that's pretty good, but I want to get that better.
This video down here, which has 61% audience retention here
that's potentially thousands of viewers who are abandoning
at this stage of the video
and that really does need to be better
and of course I can improve that
by clicking on one of these videos and then maybe
just watching the first 30 seconds to see why that happened.
There are extra key moments here
like continuous segments and spikes
although I never find them quite as interesting,
although on this one, I'm pretty sure those spikes are
where it is going to be timestamps.
I guess jacking to effect
is often influenced by timestamps.
So yeah, really going into the key moments to try
and get that above 70%, maybe by the end
of 2021 would be a fantastic achievement for myself.
Now this next analytic has only just been introduced
but I'm really interested in it
as it's data from your community tab.
So this is only going to apply
to channels with over 1000 subscribers
but I'm just going to show you this here,
according to the data,
almost every other person is interacting
with some of our voting polls
which I find incredible to have that much engagement.
So to be honest
vidIQ is probably going to continue to do even more polls
on our community tab,
but yeah I want to dive into this even more.
Impression likes per impression, 7%.
That seems pretty good just for a status update
from a community tab on the YouTube home feed.
So some exciting stuff here.
And as usual
I should probably pay a little bit more attention
to these playlists, cards, end screens
they are all important, but I think the roots
of my current vidIQ challenges,
are audience retention
all right, then this next one is a biggie.
At least for me, it is return viewers.
I continue to say that I believe this metric is
now far more important than subscribers.
And let me try and explain to you why right now I'll go back
to the overview section and we can see
that in the month of April, 2021,
we got 25,000 subscribers.
Okay.
So as we understand that they've pressed the red button
because they're keen to watch more of our content.
However, when we go to returning viewers
and this doesn't necessarily reflect all of our subscribers
it's just people who've watched one of our videos
and then returned to watch another video in the last month
this purple line, which reflects return viewers
hasn't really moved,
the start of the month it was 17,000
and at the end of the month
we have one or two fluctuations throughout the month
it's at 26,000, but that can easily go up or down
depending on when a video is being posted.
As you can see there
we've no video posted we're down at 15,000.
So even now 25,000 new subscribers
this needle on return, viewers has hardly moved.
And that's why I don't really put any value
into subscribers over than the gold play button.
That's that's the only thing that really matters
in the sense of channel clout, as opposed to channel growth.
You've probably already seen the videos I've made on
what I think is the new aspect
of trying to unlock the YouTube Algorithm
with these return viewers.
And I'm critical of myself here.
This is the entirety of 2021.
I'm just not getting people to return
to our contents frequently or more people.
There was this one occasion right here where
the purple line, which is return viewers is right.
Actually exceeded new viewers.
And that was right when I was talking
about this very tool in the YouTube Algorithm.
So I want to concentrate more on that, but just,
whether I'm just too distracted by making slightly
different pieces of content going onto YouTube shorts
or maybe talking about YouTube taxes that not
every viewer is that interested in that is I think an area
of self-discipline that I really need to reign in
when it comes to my channel,
now as always with these videos
it's gone on way longer than I thought
and I could cover a lot more ground
but I'm going to gauge the reaction to this video first
if you enjoy it and you feel as if you want to learn more
about other parts of a YouTube Analytics, well
you've watched it until the end.
So that's a clear indication
if this video does perform well
then it encouraged me to make another one
for maybe May, 2021.
And we can look at what I've tried to improve in that month.
And some other very specific analytics which are
going to help me understand the channel more
and help you understand more
about the analytics behind your channel.
So thank you very much for watching.
I'll see you in the next one
enjoy the rest of your video making day.